Technical Field
The present disclosure relates generally to the genealogy of research publications and, more specifically, to systems and methods for visualizing relationships between a subset of publications stored in a digital repository.
Description of the Related Art
Research publications use citations to provide detailed references to previous works which have a bearing on the subject of the current publication. Publications may contain citations to previous works in footnotes or endnotes. Other publications may include citations inline within the text (e.g., citations in legal opinions). Citations usually have a standard format, which allows a reader to quickly and easily determine the sources referenced by a publication. For example, given online article repositories such as the ACM Digital Library (located at http://dl.acm.orq) and Google Scholar (located at http://scholar.google.com), reviewing a list of articles referenced by a particular paper has become relatively straightforward.
Typically, the references cited by a publication are viewed as a textual list. A textual list does not convey information about the relationships between publications as well as a graphical display. Furthermore, visualizations conventionally display only a single generation of references (i.e., a list of publications cited by the publication as well as a list of publications that cite the publication) rather than multiple generations, which prevent a user from easily discovering related publications that are not directly referenced by a particular publication. Thus, conventional visualizations of references cited by a publication do not provide broad contextual information useful to a person searching through a large database of publications.
Therefore, what are needed in the art are techniques for visualizing the genealogy of publications collected in a database that address one or more of the problems set forth above.